Duke fakes it by unplugging the tape machine and hurling a grapefruit into the tub. Electrified Bathtub: On a bad trip, Dr.Also, Duke and Gonzo are not shown to suffer any permanent consequences from their various bad trips. Drugs Are Good: They're certainly useful if you're bummed about how The '60s turned out.Duke's hallucinations are frightening and disorienting, and Gonzo keeps on lashing out with knives. More generally, Duke and Gonzo take a lot of drugs, but they don't seem to have much fun.I was going to die, just sitting there on the bed, unable to move I needed artificial respiration, but I couldn't even open my mouth to say so. Not even my lungs seemed to be functioning. He accepts largely out of irony.ĭeath, I was sure of it. note The piece about Acosta was, in 1971, published in Rolling Stone as "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan." When this falls through, in part due to their severe drug saturation, Raoul attempts to return to Los Angeles, but gets called back into Vegas by Rolling Stone for the National District Attorneys Association's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. because Acosta's radical friends thought that he was spending too much time with Thompson, a gringo WASP whom they suspected of being a police agent ( not at all an unrealistic suspicion in 1970). In actuality, Thompson was writing a piece on Acosta and the then-fledgling Chicano-rights movement, and both were glad to have an excuse to get out of L.A. Gonzo, based on Chicano attorney/activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, with nationality changed to protect the innocent guilty) traveling from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to chronicle the Mint 400 desert bike race for Sports Illustrated, consuming many, many illegal drugs in the process. The story involves a mad journalist (Raoul Duke, based on Thompson) and his Samoan attorney (Dr. It starts at the line above and goes downhill from there. An audio drama version was released on CD in 1996, with Harry Dean Stanton (who also had a cameo in the movie) as the narrator, Jim Jarmusch as Duke, and Maury Chaykin as Gonzo. The book was adapted into a 1998 film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. Thompson and illustrated by Ralph Steadman, loosely based on two trips to Las Vegas that Thompson took "in search of The American Dream". "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."įear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a legendarily insane book written in 1971 by Hunter S.